This year, we’re hosting Yarn School and Felt School back to back by popular demand for a full week of fiberlicious frenzy! Come for just one workshop, or stay for both and get a free BYOF (bring your own fiber) session in the dye lab and a free bonus day in between!

Every Yarn School and Felt School student gets a marvelous fiber goodie bag. If you’re a fiber arts supplier and you’d like to get samples of your goods into the hot little hands of rabid fiber enthusiasts via the Yarn School and/or Felt School goodie bags, contact nikol at harveyvilleproject dot com.

Here are our guidelines:

Fiber items should be at least one ounce

Add-ins like locks, sparkle, notions, etc., may be smaller

All samples should be clearly labeled with the vendor’s name & contact info

Please provide 36 items for the Yarn School bags and/or 24 items for the Felt School bags

Door prizes should be clearly labeled with vendor’s name & contact info

All goodie/door prize contributors may submit a 50×140 pixel gif of jpeg banner for display on the Fiber School, Yarn School, or Felt School pages (please specify) and The Thrifty Knitter website. Banners will post after items are received and will appear until registration for the Spring session opens.

[So this is the part where we ease in to this new bloggy thing. We’re in the process of converting the whole site so we can update automatically. Here’s the first of our month-in-review posts.]

June was a busy month, and thankfully reasonably cool and pleasant after an unseasonably hot Prom night. We started off the month saying goodbye to friends and visitors staying over from Prom (May 31). There was much rain, so high humidity, but nights were cool and the local CSA kicked in full-swing with gorgeous fresh produce all month. I continued my cheesemaking experiments, switching mostly to high-temperature goat cheeses until we sort out the raw cheese milking master plan (I’m buying/trading from a local meat goat farmer who has a few milk goats she’s trying out). And we started putting a pretty good dent in the side of beef in the freezer.

Around the middle of the month, there were 10 days of rock at The Harveyville Project when Kid Congo Powers came out to record an album with Kiki Solis & Ron. Jason Ward, one of my oldest friends (& now a fancy sound engineer and the co-owner with Bob Weston of Chicago Mastering Service), joined them to get it all down (and get his ass handed to him at Scrabble).

Ron & Kiki got started a few days early, and there was a little mad scrambling with slow repairs to some necessary equipment (Ron would be more useful here… one of the Tascams and a bass amp, maybe? I’m not musical…), but it all came together just in the nick of time. Then Kid & Jason arrived and they banged out a record in less than a week (and that’s my scream on “La Llorona”!).

Sadly, most of my photos of the proceedings got corrupted, but Jason got some great shots in the studio and outside. Everyone was delightful, and Kid was especially sweet and charming. It was kind of exciting having him here.

The Kansas weather was particularly showy-offy, so Jason also got some amazing time-delay shots of one of our frequent Kansas electrical storms, plus several shots of the boys standing in one of the afternoon downpours.

June ended with glorious, breezy fluffy cloud days. On the last weekend, the Spring 08 Yarn School helpers came out to Harveyville for a dye party the day before Spinsters Club. Then on Sunday, we met at Marta’s place (Alpacas in Wildcat Hollow, Eskridge, KS). We spent the afternoon spinning in her beautiful, breezy, shaded garden gazebo, followed by a field trip to Settlers Farm, spinster Jennifer’s new yarn & fiber store in Wamego (blogged here and here on The Thrifty Knitter).